Publications

This Review of Venice, Italy, offers a comprehensive assessment of the city-region’s economy and the extent to which its land use, labour market and environmental policies embrace a metropolitan vision. A new understanding of the provinces of Padua, Treviso and Venice as an interconnected city-region of 2.6 million people guides this study. Venice ranks as among the most dynamic and productive city-regions in the OECD, with high employment levels and growth rates. Though it has thrived on a model of small firms and industrial clusters, it is undergoing a deep economic transformation. Venice confronts growing environmental challenges as a result of rising traffic congestion and costly infrastructure pressures, exacerbated by sprawl. Demographics are also changing, due to ageing inhabitants, immigrant settlement and the rapid depopulation of the historic city of Venice.

This report offers a comparative analysis of these issues, utilising the OECD’s metropolitan database to benchmark productivity and growth. It draws on regional economics, urban planning, transportation studies and hydrology to throw light on the changes within the city-region. In light of planned inter-city rail extensions, the Review calls for programmes to increase economic synergies between Venice and its neighbours. It evaluates key tools for promoting economic growth and metropolitan governance and proposes enhanced co-ordination of land use policies, additional business development services for small and medium-sized businesses, and the enlargement of university-linked innovation. Given frequent flooding, the report appraises the quality of metropolitan water governance and Venice’s potential to become a powerful reference for climate change adaptation.

Climate change is likely to have significant impacts on the agricultural sector to which farmers will have to adapt. While agriculture is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, it is also a source of carbon storage in soils. This report examines the economic and policy issues related to the impacts of climate change on agriculture and adaptation responses and to the mitigation of greenhouse gases from agriculture. It outlines research undertaken and underway in other national and international research agencies. It also highlights some of the knowledge gaps on the impacts of climate change on food production and the uncertainties of those impacts in a global context that warrant further research efforts. In particular, the report analyses marginal abatement cost curves, which show the relative costs of achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emission through the implementation of different actions in the agricultural sector. The aim of the report is to help guide policy makers in the design of policies to address climate change issues in agriculture.

Almost one quarter of global electricity could be generated from nuclear power by 2050, making a major contribution to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This is the central finding of the Nuclear Energy Technology Roadmap, published today by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). Such an expansion will require nuclear generating capacity to more than triple over the next 40 years, a target the roadmap describes as ambitious but achievable.

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OECD countries have made significant reform progress in recent decades, in fields as diverse as competition policy, health care and the environment. How have they done it? And why have reforms advanced in some places and stalled in others? This collection of essays analyses the reform experiences of the 30 OECD countries in nine major policy domains in order to identify lessons, pitfalls and strategies that may help foster policy reform in the future. While taking full account of the tremendous differences in the political and institutional settings in which these reforms were undertaken, the authors highlight a number of common challenges and potential solutions that hold good across both countries and issue areas. They show that the scope for cross-national policy learning is enormous.

The importance of such reform lessons is all the greater in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis. As OECD governments confront the challenge of trying to restore public finances to health without undermining the recovery, they will need to pursue a careful mix of fiscal policies and growth-enhancing structural reforms. Designing, adopting and implementing such a policy mix will require the crafting of effective reforms and effective strategies for implementing them.

Drawing on the OECD’s expertise in comparing country experiences and identifying best practices, this book summarises OECD’s policy advice for Greece in a wide variety of policy areas. It proposes a strategy to correct imbalances and modernize the economy, accompanied by action plans in public administration and budgets; pensions; the governance of state owned enterprises; tax policies; employment and social policy; education; new sources of growth, innovation and green growth; competition; and the complex political economy problems associated with reforms in the public sector.

Small firms are playing an ever-increasing role in innovation, driven by changes in technologies and markets. Some spin-offs and high growth firms are having remarkable success. However, the broad bulk of small firms are not capitalising on their advantages. This book explores how government policy can boost innovation by improving the environment for entrepreneurship and small firm development and increasing the innovative capacities of enterprises. Policy findings and recommendations are presented in three key areas: embedding firms in knowledge flows; developing entrepreneurship skills; and social entrepreneurship. In addition, country notes present statistics and policy data on SMEs, entrepreneurship and innovation for 40 economies, including OECD countries, Brazil, China, Estonia, Indonesia, Israel, the Russian Federation, Slovenia and South Africa.

SMEs, Entrepreneurship and Innovation is part of the OECD Innovation Strategy, a comprehensive policy strategy to harness innovation for stronger and more sustainable growth and development, and to address the key global challenges of the 21st century. For more information about the OECD Innovation Strategy, see www.oecd.org/innovation/strategy.

This report is based on a study carried out by the NEA Decommissioning Cost Estimation Group (DCEG) on decommissioning cost elements, estimation practices and reporting requirements. Its findings indicate that cost methodologies need to be updated continuously using cost data from actual decommissioning projects and hence, systematic approaches need to be implemented to collect these data. The study also concludes that changes in project scope may have the greatest impact on project costs. Such changes must therefore be identified immediately and incorporated into the estimate. Finally, the report notes that more needs to be done to facilitate the comparison of estimates, for example by providing a reporting template for national estimates.

This energy technology roadmap envisions that by 2050, photovoltaic could provide 11% of global electricity production (4 500 TWh per year), corresponding to 3 000 gigawatts of cumulative installed photovoltaic capacity. In addition to contributing to significant greenhouse gas emission reductions, photovoltaic will deliver substantial benefits in terms of the security of energy supply and socio-economic development. This roadmap also identifies technology goals and milestones that must be undertaken by different stakeholders to enable the most cost-efficient expansion of photovoltaic.

The emerging technology known as concentrating solar power, or CSP, holds much promise for countries with plenty of sunshine and clear skies. For CSP to claim its share of the coming energy revolution, concerted action is required over the next ten years by scientists, industry, governments, financing institutions and the public. This roadmap is intended to help chart the course to broad development and deployment of CSP.